Drupal.org Industry Pages Are Live!

We are excited to announce that the first three industry pages are now live on Drupal.org, highlighting the power of Drupal solutions in higher education, government and media/publishing. The pages are designed to quickly inform and inspire technical evaluators and connect them to service providers and technology vendors who can help them move further through their Drupal adoption journey.

The Drupal Association is incredibly proud to showcase the Drupal community’s innovation, creativity, and ability to solve end users’ challenging problems. More importantly, these pages are a resource that Drupal businesses can point to as they convince potential clients that Drupal is the right choice for them. We know this is a needed resource not only because Drupal agencies have asked for this, but because our user research was resoundingly positive. One government digital director said “I wish this was around when I was pitching my state CIO on Drupal”.

This launch is the first phase for this initiative. We will learn and iterate to keep improving the pages and we will expand the industries to include pages like healthcare, finance, ecommerce, and more.

The Research We Used

Building the industry pages was a community effort. Drupal Association staff framed the concept and then reached out to end-users of Drupal in these industries, service providers who’ve built solutions for these markets, and the community at large. We listened to all of you who shared your thoughts in the original blog post about this initiative.

We conducted user research, interviewing decision makers and influencers at end user organizations to make sure the pages resonated strongly with them. We talked to organizations like Weather.com, Burda Media, State of North Carolina, Georgia Technology Authority, Duke University, Cornell University – and more!

We will continue to take feedback from our global community. Our goal is to keep iterating on these industry pages as we learn more.

About The Pages

The industry pages are part of the About Drupal section and they are promoted from the Drupal.org front page. The homepage of Drupal.org receives about 350,000 visits a month, and about 50% of those visitors are new to Drupal.org The front page is primarily technical evaluators coming to learn more about Drupal and we see this as they click on our evaluator resources like About Drupal, TryDrupal, and Case Studies.

Based on user research, we know that before someone comes to the industry pages, they likely know that Drupal is an open source community-built CMS and their organization is leaning towards an open source solution. However, we did make sure the pages do not assume the visitor already knows what Drupal is, because some will find the page through search.

Another key feature is geo-targeting. Currently, we serve localized content for the Americas, EMEA, and AP/Australia/New Zealand regions. This allows us to showcase case studies that will resonate to visitors based on their location. For example, on the Americas page, we highlight the Department of Energy – a U.S federal agency. In EMEA, we highlight City of London – a UK city, and in AP/Australia/New Zealand we highlight the State Revenue Office of Victoria, Australia – a federal agency. We took this approach because business owners at digital agencies from each region said that having localized brand names and case studies helps them convince their potential clients that Drupal is a viable option for them.

The Story We Are Telling

The story that the pages tell to visitors is:

Drupal is the open source CMS of choice for this industry. Just look at the strong adoption rate, industry brand names, and their success stories.

Solutions are made up of Drupal and third party software and hosting solutions. Plus, you can use industry-specific distributions to accelerate your build.

Because of Drupal’s extensibility and our robust ecosystem of third-party technology integrations, modules, Drupal hosting, and distributions, you can tailor a solution to solve your unique problems or create new opportunities. Check out some featured industry-specific vendors.

Read case studies to learn how big names in your industry achieved business gains with a Drupal solution.

These solutions were built by people at well-respected Drupal agencies who are top contributors to Drupal.

If you want to talk to someone about creating a Drupal solution, fill out the form and all three will contact you.

For the Americas region we have secured partners for Drupal evaluators to reach out to discuss their industry needs. However, we have not yet secured agency and vendor sponsors for these pages. It takes a lot of work to line up those relationships and tee-up the content and we wanted to launch sooner than later so we could start learning how to optimize the pages. So for now, we’ve selected initial case study content for these regions, and we are promoting a link to the marketplace to show agencies who have industry experience in these regions. Over time, we will open up the opportunity for agencies to sponsor the pages similar to our approach in the Americas region.

Because the industry pages give premier visibility and sponsorship is so limited, we wanted to be as fair as possible when opening up this sponsorship opportunity. As we say amongst staff, we want to “sell with a soul”. We decided to only sell these sponsorship opportunities to those who are top contributors. We looked at companies’ code contribution levels and how long they supported the Drupal Association financially and came up with an internal ranking system. Only those above a certain threshold were invited to sponsor.

This means that not only are these sponsors contributing time, talent, and treasure to this specific initiative, but they are long time contributors to the Project, helping Drupal thrive over time. It’s important to the Association that we highlight and reward good Drupal citizenship. When good Drupal citizens are doing well, we all do well. When successful, businesses can hire more Drupal talent and sponsor their contributions back to the Project. They can fund more camps and DrupalCon so we can unite and accelerate the Project in person, and they can fund Drupal.org hosting and engineers so the community can build the Project together online. We are thankful for our sponsors’ generous giving and proud to work with them on this initiative.

We’ve created value together

We see this initiative as a great demonstration of serving our mission – “to unite the community to help them build and promote the software”. We united members from all facets of the community: end-users, service providers, and the community at large. The pages promote the software by showing that Drupal is a winning choice for evaluators in these key industries.

This project is a reflection of Drupal’s amazing spirit and culture of respecting diverse opinions, collaboration, and striving to do the best. Thank you to everyone involved in this project for working so well together, listening to each other’s different ideas, and finding ways to incorporate them so together we can build something amazing.